Mavis Gallant: The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories

Two stories, “Willi” and “One Aspect of a Rainy Day,” are about German characters in postwar Europe, a subject which Gallant would explore more extensively in the 1973 collection, The Pegnitz Junction . The characters dream of home but cannot return, and are not made to feel at home in France, where they live. They exist without resident permits, without legitimacy, with little but memories of a previous life. Willi, a former prisoner of war, now serves as a consultant on films made about the Occupation; twenty years on, the horrors of the Holocaust are already material for the movies. “One Aspect of a Rainy Day,” about a German scholarship student, concerns a general strike and a political demonstration. Because of rain and an absent mayor, the demonstration is futile. “They might have been coming from anywhere — a cinema, or a funeral,” the narrator observes when the desultory group breaks apart. The story was published in 1962, the year after the Paris Massacre, when French police attacked roughly thirty thousand unarmed peaceful Algerian demonstrators. “Sunday Afternoon” also takes place during the Algerian conflict. Veronica, a nineteen-year-old girl from London, sits in her apartment in curlers and a bathrobe while her American boyfriend, Jim, who has forgotten why he fell in love with her, talks to a Tunisian friend about whether Algeria will go to the Communists. Veronica is excluded from the conversation, expected only to pour the coffee; the story is less about politics than about the chauvinistic world of men. Veronica resists autonomy, crying when Jim tells her that she’s free. We know he will never marry her: “She was the homeless, desperate girl in Paris against whom he might secretly measure, one future day, a plain but confident wife.”

Veronica and Jim’s casual cohabitation is an exception in this collection. Most of the couples are married, most of them unhappily. Infidelity runs through the stories as a matter of course. A wedding ring is flung, unforgettably, into the twilight. A number of the characters are either divorced or in overburdened, disillusioned relationships. Wives declare to their husbands that they do not like men. “Bernadette” is a particularly damning instance of a loveless marriage, and is also an indictment of domestic life in Fifties suburbia. The couple, Nora and Robbie, had once been campus liberals, writing plays, drinking beer out of old pickle jars, hoping to change the world. Now they live in a large pseudo-Tudor home outside Montreal, with a lawyer’s salary, a live-in maid, and two daughters in boarding school. Nora’s activism takes the form of cocktail parties, and Robbie, who serially seduces other women and is serially forgiven, is also seduced by sentimental literary images of the working class. Curious about the kitchen in which their maid, Bernadette, grew up, he asks her to describe it to him, and is told, simply, “It’s big.” The reality — the table “masked with oilcloth…always set between meals, the thick plates turned upside down, the spoons in a glass jar…butter, vinegar, canned jam with the lid of the can half opened and wrenched back, ketchup, a tin of molasses glued to its saucer”—is impossible for Bernadette to articulate, or for her employer to comprehend.

Women of my generation, born after the mid-Sixties, were raised to believe that having a career and raising a family were not mutually exclusive pursuits, but for the women in Gallant’s early stories, they almost always are. “You’ll probably get married sometime, anyway, so what does it matter what you learn?” Mike asks Barbara, a teenaged girl who has failed out of one of New York City’s best schools, in “One Morning in May.” His remark “strike[s] her into silence, ” but moments later Barbara wonders if Mike might be the solution: “It had occurred to her many times in this lonely winter that only marriage would save her from disgrace, from growing up with no skills and no profession.” This was a time before the pill, before the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment and Roe versus Wade . Gilles, in “The Burgundy Weekend,” remembers the women of the generation just prior to those landmark struggles and reforms:

“They were made out of butter. They had round faces and dimples and curly hair. Bright lipstick…They could have fallen in the Seine and never drowned — they’d have floated downstream on their petticoats. They wore Italian shoes that were a disaster. All those girls have ruined feet now. They looked like children dressed up — too much skirt, mother’s shoes. They smiled and smiled and wanted to get married. They were infantile, underdeveloped. Retarded.”

His brutal condescension shocks our ears, revealing a misogyny that has since become less socially acceptable. Though marriage tended to be a girl’s only option for establishing herself in adulthood, it was often a premature one. Nineteen-year-old Cissy, in “Autumn Day,” is an example of this: unsure of herself, fuzzy about the facts of life, dressed in Peter Pan collars and drinking sugary alcoholic drinks. Her husband, ten years older, is more of a parent than a sexual partner, telling her what to do and how to behave: “Don’t talk war. Avoid people on farm. Meet Army wives. Go for walks.” True to their time, in most of these marriages the husband works and the wife stays home to raise the family (the fashion model in “Thieves and Rascals,” afraid to cry because she has a photo shoot the next morning and does not want puffy eyes, is an exception). Alongside economic dependence for women in traditional marriages, there are women who depend on other women (“The Cost of Living” and “Acceptance of Their Ways”) and men who depend on women (“Travelers Must Be Content”). The dependency in these relationships is not so much emotional as literal, and it frequently turns parasitic. Characters in these stories may not connect to each other, but they need each other to survive.

Human dependency is at its most basic when it comes to children, and this book is filled with them. Only they have little to count on. Children are deemed a nuisance, a burden, “a remote, alarming race.” This was an era when people began families young, when they were still essentially children themselves. Mothers resent their offspring for turning them ugly and spoiling their figures. Chaperones are typical, children left in the care of friends, extended family, and hired help. Or they are shipped off to boarding school (Nora, the wife in “Bernadette,” sends away her daughters because she “didn’t trust herself to bring them up”). There is a refusal, on the part of parents, to accept their children as they are. In “Thieves and Rascals,” the father is annoyed that his daughter is “gauche and untidy,” and that her Swiss governess has not groomed “a model little girl, clean and silent as a watch.” Between mothers and daughters, there is often competition — mothers wanting to be mistaken for their daughters’ sisters, for example — and there is also some meanness. In “The Wedding Ring,” the mother tells her brunette daughter to cover her head with a hat lest the sun turn her hair into a “rusty old stove lid.”

Perhaps these parents are feckless, perhaps they too young or self-centered to care for offspring, perhaps they are simply undeserving of them. Whatever the reason, parents maintain a distance from their children, physical as well as emotional, relinquishing their responsibilities, or regarding them as an afterthought. Even when aware of their shortcomings, parents have little motivation to change. “We can’t lie here and discuss her character and all her little ways,” the mother in “Thieves and Rascals” says to her husband, after their daughter has been expelled from boarding school for spending a weekend in a hotel with a young man. “Evidently neither of us knows anything about them. We can talk about what lousy parents we are. That won’t help either. We might as well sleep, if we can.”